“Keep an eye out for ‘Geeks for George,’” says Takach, a 55-year-old Toronto technology lawyer who admits to being somewhat of a computer geek himself.

“There are a million and a half gamers in this country, most of them between the ages of 18 and 35. Right now they’re apolitical … I’m going to reach out to them. I’m going to show them social acceptance. My agenda about a superfast Internet, a digital bill of rights, will resonate very deeply with them.”

With this squad of computer-game aficionados backing him, Takach hopes to vault from unknown, dark-horse candidate to serious contention.

But he’s not the only Liberal leadership candidate looking for support among politically checked-out Canadians.

The acknowledged front-runner, Papineau MP Justin Trudeau, is also signing up volunteers who have never before been involved in any political campaign.

A month ago, Trudeau’s team had signed up about 1,800 volunteers and about 1,000 were political rookies. Since then, officials say, those numbers have doubled and the ratio has remained roughly the same.

All this outreach to strangers is the product of a decision to allow non-members of the Liberal party — “supporters,” they’re called — to cast a ballot in the leadership race. So far, the party says it has signed up roughly 40,000 of these people, who have all supplied the Liberals with their names, numbers and basic personal details such as age, address and email co-ordinates.

And that’s where the raw, political calculation comes in.

The Liberals aren’t just conducting a leadership contest. They are also using this race to engage in a massive, data-collection exercise — a catch-up effort. In the last couple of elections, the Conservatives and New Democrats have surged far ahead of the Liberals in this cutting-edge aspect of modern electioneering.

And any party with hopes of political revival can’t afford to stay behind the curve in the data game for long. As the recent U.S. presidential election demonstrated, victory goes to the side with the best methods for identifying and mobilizing the vote. President Barack Obama’s team has been especially adept in finding support among the traditionally disengaged constituencies in America, for instance.

To do this with any level of success, you need mountains of data on voters and, more importantly, the non-voters, who can make or break close contests.

Though all the major Canadian political parties have more or less the same, state-of-the-art technology to amass voter data, the machinery is only as good as the information in it. On that score, the Liberals have lagged badly — even though they bought and modified the U.S. Democrats’ system several years ago and turned it into their own machine, called “Liberalist”

Former party president Alf Apps did an extensive, state-of-the-party memo when he stepped down a year ago and he was particularly critical of how Liberals had allowed themselves to be outgunned in the data race. Even by the end of the 2011 campaign, Liberalist had data on only 1.3 million Canadians — it was working at about 4.3 per cent of its capacity, in other words, Apps noted.

Liberals now say they are working flat-out to fill that database. Once a leadership candidate files official papers with the party, his or her team is given enhanced access to Liberalist, in the hopes that they will feed as much information into it as they are receiving.

Trudeau’s campaign did have its own database, also bought from U.S. Democratic sources, but organizers have realized Liberalist works better for them. The Trudeau campaign also holds contests to encourage sign-ups of volunteers — people can win dinner with Trudeau or autographed shirts if they are particularly good at making new friends.

For too long, many Liberals agree, the party has been conducting a conversation with itself, among the same, old usual suspects, with the same old lingering feuds and grudges. It hasn’t totally shaken its history of infighting, which it could afford to indulge when it was comfortably in power. Now the goal is to get Liberals to remember that their enemies are sitting in the government and official opposition benches in the Commons, not in their own backroom.

So beyond the need to collect data, the party could also use some new faces to shake up the old, dysfunctional dynamics.

It’s also why no one is getting too fussed about the large number of candidates circling around the race, many of them virtual unknowns, even within Liberal circles.

Takach acknowledges that he wouldn’t be in the contest if it wasn’t for this new “supporter” class of potential voters. As the Liberals have set out on a quest to arm themselves for the political data wars, they have presented an opportunity to people like Takach.

“Yes, it’s pretty audacious to be running right out of the gate,” Takach said. “If it weren’t for the supporter category, we wouldn’t be talking right now.”

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